On display at the UVA School of Architecture's Elmaleh Gallery, the exhibition In the Shadow of the Cloud: Reimagining the Technical Landscapes of Northern Virginia unveils how the modern spatial history of Northern Virginia is intrinsically tangled with the development and growth of digital technologies and their networks. This body of design research, curated and conceived of by Assistant Professor of Architecture Ali Fard, recounts the histories and trajectories that have contributed to the region's emergence as the world's largest data market over the past five decades. Fard, who directs the Media, Infrastructure, Speculative Territories Laboratory (MIST_lab) at UVA, explores emerging media and infrastructural systems as both the sites and means of speculative design research on urbanism.
The multimedia exhibition features a series of interventions by MIST_lab including a 1:20,000 scale model of Northern Virginia's topography that interacts with projected maps, drawings, videos, and images to produce a multifaceted reading of the infrastructural palimpsest of NOVA. Other interventions include models that project what the future of Northern Virginia sites may look like by examining three spatial typologies: the quarry, the data center, and the highway interchange.
In dialogue with the architectural and urban representations of MIST_lab, the exhibition includes a selection of photographic works by Stephen Voss, a Washington, D.C.-based photographer who is well known for his portraits, most often of American politicians. While the ten large-format photographs in this exhibition are a departure from his typical portraits, the works instead provocatively document the realities of the built environment. They strikingly portray the overt physicality of the so-called ephemeral "cloud" — a landscape shaped by data centers which he describes as "symbols of our limitless demand for digital connection and the steep, often unseen price it exacts."
